Wednesday 5 August 2015

Blackest Night arc: "What's this, something to do with zombies that's... ORIGINAL?"

This took longer then what I was expecting, and for that I apologize. This was intended to go up early April, right after the Digimon Marathon, however as you can see, that didn't happen. But, I do keep my word, so here we are, the Blackest Night arc, the first ever Comic book review on this site.

For those who either don't remember, or haven't seen the post covering it, let me explain how these reviews are going to work, at least, how I'll handle them (which has been updated anyway, so...). Due to many comic book stories and characters lasting many decades, it would be almost impossible for me to review entire comic series and still keep a weekly content schedule, especially when you deal with characters that have been around since World War II and before. As such, this will be handled in arcs, arcs that you get to decide. At the end of almost every review, with the exception being this opening period, I'll be putting up a strawpoll that has (at time of writing) 4 arcs, one from Detective Comic (DC), one from Marvel Comics, one from Archie Comics, and one from IDW publishing. These arcs will be picked from any arc that you send me as a request or, if necessary due to how rarely I get requests, are added in by me in order to fill polls. Anyone is able to send me arc requests, even from other publishers (the only reason why its four is because those are the four I know of). Each poll will last until the next Comic review, which I'm hoping to make a monthly occurrence.

With all that out of the way, time to look at Blackest Night.



Due to how many issues are in this arc, this has been paraphrased a lot. I'm leaving out information here, as I don't want this to be longer then  my Age of Extinction Review. In the DC Mythos, emotions can be used to power special rings, given to members of species that have a strong connection to that emotion... For some reason, one of them is the love of the dead and as such we have Black Power Rings, rings that can be used to resurrect the dead, the collection getting stronger with each resurrection. And when you're dealing with zombies of most of the DC Super Heroes, you're going to have problems. As such, its up to the living to face the dead, and stop the foretold Blackest Night (which I maintain the fact that Darkest Night, the name I kept calling it, is a much better name). While I'm going to avoid writing this as a spoiler, as a heads up, the finale uses comic book logic for an almost reboot.
"And here we have Batman doing is zombie Man Bat impression"

While the story is nice and original, I can't help but feel that there is padding in it. With how the story goes, it assumes you're familiar with characters, but still feels the need to explain them to certain extents. My one problem with this is that I haven't seen before or after this arc in this generation of comics so I can't say for certain, again, I'm basing this off the arc alone. The characters themselves are nicely handled, however I'm not sure of how in character they are, again, limits of this format of review. The art style is also bright, but also dark, everything pops out of the page, it looks amazing. My one complaint on the matter is there are times where I personally think the speech bubbles could have been broken up a bit, however this would add to the padding problem, so in this case I'm caught between a rock and a hard place.

If you're a fan of DC's comics and haven't read this, then I think you're may be missing out, however, if you're like me and am just trying to get into this, then this isn't the best place to start, I'd actually say its one of the worst places to start, something that, for me is worse because my knowledge of Green Lanturn is limited at best. With that being said though, I'll see you next time for something I have some... stronger views of. The 2004, live action Thunderbirds movie.

On a side note, I've updated the strawpoll to include the requests I've gotten for this along with one other one. So now the choices are:

Next Avengers x The Transformers
The first Worlds Collide
Knightfall from DC (Full name Batman: Knightfall) (However for the sake of my sanity, I'll be sticking with Broken Bat, and will save other parts for later on, I cannot read over a year's worth of comics in a week)
Nightmare Rarity (because the show won't leave me alone)
The Inika saga, from the small BIONICLE comics (yes those are a thing)
And anything I get enough requests for, with requests either getting picked, or added to the poll for next time. 

Use the link here http://strawpoll.me/5105730 to vote, with voting closing on the 26th of August.

No comments:

Post a Comment